Friday, May 27, 2011

Forgotten Victims

Greenpeace and another group of troublemakers called Platform are taking an unsympathetic view of energy companies' squeals of horror at the Government's windfall tax. Share prices in oil and gas producers have risen by an average of two hundred per cent over the past year, and Shell's profits have almost doubled since 2009. The idea that Shell might possibly keep some of its investors if it made a mere £500,000 an hour instead of one and a half million, or that share price rises of less than two hundred per cent a year may not necessarily turn Britain's boardrooms into the new Eritrea, is evidently not to be countenanced. Accordingly, the chief executive of a ministerial incentivisation collective with special responsibility for large-scale polluters and poisoners is threatening to withdraw twelve thousand million pounds' worth of investment and abolish fifteen thousand possible new jobs, on the grounds that "unexpected tax changes" damage investors' confidence. It is, in fact, just possible that this little quirk of psychology had not occurred to Daveybloke's Cuddly Chancellor, who apparently believes that cutting salaries, raising prices and throwing people out of work is just the thing to get everybody spending, and that the economy will be booming in no time as long as banks are permitted to hoard their money for bonuses rather than lending it to businesses.